Munich Opera Festival (4) - Die Walküre, 1 July 2026

Nationaltheater

Images: Monika Rittershaus

Siegmund – Joachim Bäckström
Hunding – Ain Anger
Wotan – Nicholas Brownlee
Sieglinde – Irene Roberts
Brünnhilde – Miina-Lisa Värelä
Fricka – Ekaterina Gubanova
Helmwige – Dorothea Herbert
Gerhilde – Julie Adams
Ortlinde – Elaine Gvritshvili
Waltraute – Claudia Mahnke
Siegrune – Niina Keitel
Rossweiße – Christina Rock
Grimgerde – Natalie Lewis
Schwertleite – Noa Beinart
Loge – Charith Pidikiti

Director – Tobias Kratzer
Assistant director – Matthias Piro
Designs – Rainer Sellmaier
Lighting – Michael Bauer
Video – Manuel Braun, Jonas Dahl, Janic Bebi
Dramaturgy – Bettina Bartz, Olaf Roth

Bayerische Staatsorchester
Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)

 

As a student in Berlin, Ludwig Feuerbach attended lectures from, among others, GWF Hegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher: far from an unusual combination, but prophetic for his subsequent development as the pre-eminent Young Hegelian philosopher of love-communism. Although he lectured at Erlangen, Feuerbach failed to obtain a university position, an ambition rendered impossible following revelation of his authorship of the atheistic Thoughts on Death and Immortality published anonymously in 1830, a year in which revolutions once again began to sweep Europe. His writings, including those Thoughts, The Essence of Christianity, and Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, inspired many radicals in the next wave of revolutions (1848-51), although Feuerbach remaining personally aloof from revolutionary activity. One of those, of course, was Richard Wagner, who, shortly after publication of Feuerbach’s Thoughts, had gained his first experience, direct and reported, of revolution, inspired by events in Paris, Leipzig, and even the previously quiescent Dresden. The seventeen-year old Saxon would recall in his autobiography Mein Leben ‘the world of history’ having come to life: ‘Saxony was not spared: in Dresden it even came to street-fighting’. He began to attend Leipzig University lectures on philosophy and aesthetics, and henceforth considered himself a ‘fervent partisan of the revolution’. Wagner would go on read at least all three of the Feuerbach books named above and, in contrast to one of his great intellectual mentors, stood anything but aloof from revolutionary political activity—be it in practice, during the 1849 Dresden uprising, or in the fruits of his post-revolutionary exile in Zurich. Among those were The Artwork of the Future, dedicated to Feuerbach, its very title a homage, and of course Die Walküre, perhaps his single most Feuerbachian drama—in that the positive, as well as negative, side of a religion purer than yet related to Christianity, founded on love, features most strongly in the love of Siegmund and Sieglinde, and Brünnhilde’s conversion to their creed, crucially at the ‘price’, in reality an elevation, of losing her own immortality. 

With this Walküre, newly premiered, Tobias Kratzer’s Munich Ring reaches its second instalment. I was unable to see Das Rheingold; but on the evidence of this, as well as much of his other work – his near-universally loved Bayreuth Tannhäuser, various Deutsche Oper productions, and more – I hope to put that right before long. Even considered on its own, Kratzer’s Walküre has numerous distinctions, but perhaps its most distinctive feature, at least until the third act, is a more overt Feuerbachian element than any other I can recall. I suspect it would seem so all the more in light of the Rheingold, but that must remain a matter of speculation by now. What it certainly does is put the gods, even here, centre-stage, not only as ‘the gods’, characters in this drama, but emphatically as gods—and emphatically not, as Ernst Bloch put it, ‘called gods without being gods’.

The curtain rises on a rural, possibly suburban chalet; by deduction, it may be somewhere outside Munich, though it need not be. This, of course, is Hunding’s house, at the end of the driveway a quasi-Marian shrine, albeit to Fricka. That is, Kratzer follows Wagner absolutely in presenting a dramatic critique of religion, mostly yet not only Christianity, albeit shrouded, as it were, in the guise of Germanic paganism. (Wagner is doing other things with reference to the Eddas and sagas too, but he is certainly doing that, in unambiguously post-Feuerbach fashion.) It is here, under Fricka as well as Hunding, also under a larger, indoor ecclesiastical shrine, not unlike a tabernacle or reliquary, perhaps denoting the rule of Valhalla/religion/Christianity more generally, that Siegmund takes refuge. Sieglinde is clearly a member of this religion too, since she genuflects before the shrine even when Hunding has gone—and, initially shamefully, later with abandon, celebrates her wholesale abandon(ment) only after covering it. When, in the second act, Wotan comes to earth, like the gods of old (though also, if we believe the New Testament, ours too), he is distressed not only by Fricka’s demolition of the new religion he has ultimately inspired, but by the destruction of the shrine within: his old religion, one might say. Just as Wagner’s god is torn, so is he, visibly as well as audibly so. 

That Hunding, whose cause Fricka takes, should be a devotee of her understanding of this religion – sect, perhaps – will surprise no one, but it is clear, not assumed. She even recognises herself in it; I am tempted to add, in Biblical style, ‘and it was good’, save that obviously it was not for humanity. We even see a ram, albeit a dead one; hers is a chariot, if only metaphorically, of death—as in Wagner. When death occurs, moreover, it is unquestionably violent; we are no more spared than its more direct victims. When Wotan, in anger, bids Hunding kneel before Fricka, Wagner’s goddess of ‘custom’ (as he explained in a letter to August Röckel), the bourgeois property- and motor-owner does just that: not something I have seen before. She and other gods – I assume, Froh, Donner, and Freia – whom we have already seen, in a drawing projected at some point during Wotan’s monologue, observe events on the battlefield. Dressed in designer Rainer Sellmaier’s mediaeval, even Burgundian-Nibelungenlied garb, they offer strong connection to the mediaevalism of work, Wagner’s selection and adoption of sources, and to the hostile, Young Hegelian critique of church and state such as had been mystically united in states such as the Prussia of Frederick William IV.

Another such example, if less fanatically so, was the Saxony in which Kapellmeister Wagner threatened to burn it all down—and took delight in seeing just that in his opera house: ‘8 May (Monday) Morning once again by roundabout route via barricades to Town Hall. At S. Anne Barricade guard shouts “Well, Mr Conductor, joy’s beautiful divine spark’s made a blaze.” (3rd perf. 9th Symphony at previous Palm Sunday concert; Opera House now burnt down. Strange feeling of comfort.)’ Another important point, I suspect, from Wotan’s monologue: in his proto-Parsifalian wandering, he passes a church. Out of it ran two hooded figures, disaffected youth, it would seem. Something within me wondered whether one might be Alberich, in the one Ring drama in which he ‘should’ not appear onstage. I think it was, for during the Ride of the Valkyries, a hooded figure with child, surely Hagen, watches. We shall see. To be reminded, at any rate, of Wagner’s contemporary and fellow Feuerbach enthusiast (for a while), Marx, and his more or less contemporaneous observation, in explicit Young Hegelian critique of Hegel, that ‘the relationship of industry [Alberich] and, in particular, the world of wealth to the political world [the gods] is one of the principal problems of modern times,’ was salutary—and I should be surprised to learn that it had merely been my interpretative fancy. 

So far, so excellent—all accomplished in fine Personenregie and response thereto. This is no mere concept; it is an absorbing drama. That of the third act is hardly less so in the latter respect, although it seems strangely distant from what has gone before. Perhaps more will be revealed in Siegfried or Götterdämmerung, but once past a video ‘Ride’ that took in much of Munich, Brünnhilde at the helm of Apocalypse Now helicopter, an original ‘Bavarian host’ of the Siegestor, thus returning to source as it were. Naturally, the local audience loved it, and why not, numerous aspects of the city eliciting gasps of recognition and, less laudably, actual applause. Surely one can appreciate a coup de théâtre or de cinéma without Pavlovian response. That nonetheless we should end up in the Nationaltheater may have particular warrant, given it was here that, against Wagner’s wishes, Ludwig II had it all begin. Perhaps Kratzer anticipated the applause or such reaction, and turned it against the audience avant la lettre. We can read it that way anyway. And perhaps subsequent events will play out more fully in that respect—and not too closely to Stefan Herheim’s metatheatrical Deutsche Oper Ring. But it seemed a slight pity. There is still much to admire in the emergency repair work – and religious rebirth? – offered by Valkyrie body-snatchers to heroes, as well as in the passionate direction and portrayal of Wotan and Brünnhilde thereafter. That the demi-god Loge appears as bidden, with flame, at the close, ties all neatly together. Yet I could not help but think – this is really my sole cavil – a more apt setting might have been found, unless the point be that the opera house is now our dubious temple. If so, I shall happily recant; again, we shall see.

In one sense, though, even that helped point, in the unlikely event anyone should have needed pointing, to the truest heroes of all: the orchestra that first performed this work. Wherever you may have heard it, in Berlin, Bayreuth, Dresden, Vienna, or elsewhere, it is unlikely to have been played better than this. Strings were dark yet incisive, ‘old German’ in a way Furtwängler might have recognised, ‘dramatic’ in a way Boulez might have done. The rest of the playing was equally outstanding, the Ride far more than showpiece, but rather quite rightly a symphonic movement taking its place in Wagner’s dramatic whole. Vladimir Jurowski’s conducting had its moments in better and worse senses. To begin with, too often one could hear as well as see him conduct. Wagner became a miniaturist in a sense too close to Nietzsche’s jibe. It was all too effortful, though to Jurowski’s credit, he never tried to get this great orchestra to sound like anything other than itself. The third act was more at ease with itself, with far fewer odd impositions upon it; it flowed in a way closer to the Rhine (or Isar) and thus the orchestra’s mysterious, Delphic oracle sounded more unbidden—save, in the eternal riddle, for who might have created its own gods.

Speaking of heroes, Joachim Bäckström made for a fine Siegmund, his chemistry with Irene Roberts’s increasingly ecstatic Sieglinde – what a foretelling of Siegfried she offered! – thrilling and, at times, disturbing to watch. For Kratzer did not follow Wagner in his understanding of incest. These twins, even the religious Sieglinde, were positively excited by the prospect of incest, as opposed to loving each other and its revelation not mattering. Again, film revealed some of the backstory, adding to rather than merely mirroring what we learned from narration—at least after the first, slightly disappointing instalment. Nicholas Brownlee’s Wotan we had thus seen and known already, his fireside sadness, seen by the siblings’ mothers, projected into a wise, multivalent portrayal of the ‘sum of present-day intelligence’ (Wagner on the character, immediately prior to starting work on the score of this opera).  

Ekaterina Gubanova’s imperious, haughty, godlike Fricka was all one might hope for, in general and in context. Ain Anger’s self-assured Hunding was no mere thug, though he was certainly given to violence; here was a man who knew his beliefs and his patriarchal rights, and was willing to fight for them. Miina-Lisa Värelä’s Brünnhilde’s journey to the brink of losing immortality absorbed us through excellent, Wagnerian command of words, music, and gesture. Other Valkyries offered singing and acting of the highest order. For not the least of the work’s and performance’s virtues was a celebration of Wagner’s Feuerbachian conception of the ‘purely human’ and its socialist expansion into a vision, political, social, religious and more, that only in cooperation might we begin to achieve our potential as a species.

Bayreuth Festival (3) - Tannhäuser, 16 August 2023

Festspielhaus

Hermann, Landgrave of Thuringia - Günter Groissböck

Tannhäuser - Klaus Florian Vogt

Wolfram von Eschenbach - Markus Eiche

Walther von der Vogelweide - Siyabonga Maqungo

Biterolf - Olafur Sigurdarson

Heinrich der Schreiber - Jorge Rodriguez-Norton

Reinmar von Zweter - Jens-Erik Aasbø

Elisabeth - Elisabeth Teige

Venus - Ekaterina Gubanova

Young Shepherd - Julia Grüter

Le Gateau Chocolat - Le Gateau Chocolat

Oskar - Manni Laudenbach

Pages - Cornelia Heil, Ekaterina Gubanova, Laura Margaret Smith, Karolin Zeinert

Tobias Kratzer (director)

Rainer Sellmaier (designs)

Manuel Braun (video)

Reinhard Traub (lighting)

Konrad Kuhn (dramaturgy)

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus director: Eberhard Friedrich)

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra

Nathalie Stutzmann (conductor)

For my third and final Bayreuth performance this year, I revisited an old friend, Tobias Kratzer’s Tannhäuser. New when we met in 2019, it has weathered the pandemic storm and since assumed something close to classic status. Not that, like any of us during that or indeed any other four-year period, it has remained the same. Artists have come and gone, though some have remained: Markus Eiche’s Wolfram, Jorge Rodriguez-Nortonäs Heinrich der Schreiber, and from Kratzer’s new, Ariadne-like troupe, Manni Laudenbach’s Oskar and Le Gateau Chocolat. Memory can play tricks, so this may be a matter of my imagination, but I think Le Gateau Chocolat’s first-interval show had acquired a greater edge as storm clouds have gathered across the world in the battle to preserve, let alone extend, LGBTQ+ rights. (Let us Westerners never forget that, for much of the world, such rights remain a pipe dream.) Calling on Bayreuth to ‘come out of the closet’, explicitly telling the audience it had seen a queer show, and unfurling the rainbow flag (as would soon be done onstage, in the house, at the end of the second act) seemed, in the light of much that has happened, a more political act than ever, as necessary as the Festival’s ongoing exploration of past Jewish contributors.

To take a step back, we first meet he troupe - Tannhäuser, Venus, Le Gateau Chocolat, and Oskar - during the Overture, on Manuel Braun's wonderful video and briefly onstage. Anarchic, hurried, and chronically lacking in cash, they meet tragedy as Venus pushes down on the van’s accelerator to escape the latest, Burger King non-payment predicament and seemingly kills the policeman who had caught them. That affords the occasion for Tannhäuser deciding to leave the band and return to the Bayreuth Festival, pilgrims and all, where Tannhäuser is being played, yet stands in need of an injection of Wagner the Young German revolutionary, who stands behind them at least as much as he does behind his ‘official’ life beyond the grave. 

Venus & Co. will not take no for an answer, though, and pursue Tannhäuser, two worlds colliding above all in the Wartburg/Festspielhaus. Venus makes her way onstage as one of the pages, the discipline of an opera performance clearly not to her liking. Her invasion, joined by Le Gateau Chocolat and Oskar, occasions Tannhäuser’s crisis of artistic, sexual, and revolutionary confidence. The third act plays out much as one might have expected, albeit with a touching friendship between Elisabeth and Oskar, and a properly disturbing twist in which Elisabeth cedes to Wolfram but only so long as he is dressed as Tannhäuser. When he attempts to shed Tannhäuser’s clown wig, she adamantly replaces it. The action, though, has been prepared so as to heighten the emotional and intellectual weight of its drama. What may have seemed like an entertaining new story has proved a friend of long standing after all, a friend with whom our own journeys have shared much.

Klaus Florian Vogt, a newcomer to the title role here, did a typically committed, highly well-acted job. His voice remains controversial: put simply, people tend to like it (in a particular role) or not. Leaving that aside, and considering what he does with it, no one would have had reasonable, or even unreasonable, grounds to accord him anything but praise. And when one recalls the not-so-distant days when opera houses struggled to cast any Wagner tenor role, one realises that not everything has changed for the worst. Vogt’s Elisabeth, Elisabeth Teige, proved an unusually powerful presence in the role, her part, seemingly vocal and instrumental in quality, in second-act ensembles something close to awe-inspiring. Her compassion, moreover, was matched by her womanliness: this Elisabeth is avowedly no cipher. 

From the rest of a fine cast, Markus Eiche’s Wolfram and Siyabonga Maqungo’s Walther were impressively attendant to the demands of words, music, and stage, as was Günter Groissböck’s Landgrave, luxury casting indeed. Ekaterina Gubanova enthusiastically grasped the challenges and possibilities of Kratzer’s expanded conception of Venus, and added several more for good measure. Julia Grüter shone, strikingly so, as the Young Shepherd. And of course, Le Gateau Chocolat and Laudenbach shone in their roles, as did Eberhard Friedrich’s outstanding Bayreuth Festival Chorus (again!)

There is often a ‘but’, and here it comes. Nathalie Stutzmann’s conducting proved something of a work-in-progress. Balances were often eccentric, sometimes revealing interesting aspects of the score and (especially) its grand opéra origins, as well as affinities with Berlioz, but that eccentricity often proving puzzling rather than enlightening. There was little in the way of greater, ‘music drama’ line, which is fine up to a point if one wishes to highlight where the work, musically, has come from, but some greater sense of overall structure is surely desirable, whichever version of the work one uses. Here, for better or worse, it is Dresden. Perhaps most concerningly, there were occasions, especially during the second act, when ensemble veered dangerously close to collapse. There were, I think, good ideas here, maybe their execution will improve with greater experience in an admittedly difficult house. In any case, there was so much else to enjoy that no one seemed to notice, or care, which perhaps is as it should be. We tend to our communities, or should, as a whole, not as an aggregate of individuals.

Bayreuth Festival (2) - Parsifal, 15 August 2023

Festspielhaus

Amfortas - Derek Welton

Titurel - Tobias Kehrer

Gurnemanz - Georg Zeppenfeld

Parsifal - Andreas Schager

Klingsor - Jordan Shanahan

Kundry - Ekaterina Gubanova

Knights of the Grail - Siyabonga Maqungo, Jens-Erik Aasbø

Squires - Betsy Horne, Margaret Plummer, Jorge Rodriguez-Norton, Garrie Davislim

Flowermaidens - Evelin Novak, Camille Schnoor, Margaret Plummer, Julia Grüter, Betsy Horne, Marie Henriette Reinhold

Alto solo - Marie Henriette Reinhold

Jay Scheib (director)

Mimi Lien (designs)

Meentje Nielsen (costumes)

Rainer Casper (lighting)

Joshua Higgason (AR and video)

Marlene Schleicher (dramaturgy)

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus director: Eberhard Friedrich)

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra

Pablo Heras-Casado (conductor)

To move from Dmitri Tcherniakov’s gripping Flying Dutchman to Jay Scheib’s new and much-trumpeted, Artificial Reality-enhanced Parsifal veered towards regression from the sublime to the ridiculous. I should state that I was not one of those with the spectacles necessary to see the ‘enhanced’ version, my short-sightedness being (just) too severe. But since most in the Festspielhaus audience did not have the glasses, it does not seem unreasonable to write about what I could see, whilst noticing access issues that surely require resolution.

I wish I could tell you what Scheib’s production is about. It certainly does not seem to be founded in knowledge of, or even interest in, Wagner and Parsifal. ‘When I think of the word “Bühnenweihfestspiel,’ Scheib tells us in the programme, ‘I think first of all about a celebration. We are opening a festival! Let’s get the party started!’ Leaving aside what is presumably an unintentional hommage to the former Labour MP Keith Vaz, it is difficult to know where to start. Perhaps with advice to look up the ‘weih’ part of the word in a dictionary, and thereafter to consider what ‘consecretion’ might entail. Or even just to acquaint oneself with the plot, let alone with Wagner’s writings. Good things can, of course, proceed from misunderstandings or misappropriations; the problem is that very little at all proceeds from this or from anything else.

What do we have, then? It looks somewhat like a computer game, I think, though I am hardlly the best person to know. That, I suspect, is the ‘aesthetic’, but I may be wrong. What action there is unfolds against some of the most hideous designs I have had the misfortune to see, accompanied by apparently equally meaningless activity and lack of activity. Strange outfits sported by some of the knights in the first act suggest a directorial attempt to tell us he too has done some drugs in his time. I was unsure for a while whether the peculiar shapes on them were intended to evoke bacteria - wounds of their own? - but Gurnemanz’s sudden acquisition of them on a garish, presumably sacerdotal cloak and equally sudden dispensing of them suggested not. The poor souls looked like refugees from a discontinued children’s television programme. Earlier, indeed in the first-act Prelude, Gurnemanz has sex with a woman, tastelessly magnified on live camera. Who she is I have no idea, but she returns to stand and then walk around in the third act, before embracing him at the close. 

Amfortas’s blood, not unreasonably, appears for a while to be a preoccupation, the wound rather monstrously magnified on camera during Gurnemanz’s first-act narration. Parsifal smashes the grail at the end, though with what import again I have no idea. Certain people walk around or wear slightly different clothes. There are two Kundrys, I think, one of whom silent, sometimes mirrors the action of the other and sometimes walks around in a circle. Others, above all Parsifal and Kundry in their great confrontation in the second act, seem entirely abandoned and have to fend for themselves. And the Barbie-meets-Benny Hill aesthetic of that act, sadly lacking the intellectual heft of either, is not an experience I should wish even on Mr Vaz. That Klingsor wears heels seems a peculiar, carelessly offensive translation of self-castration. To be brutally honest, though, it is difficult to care. So boring, I am sad to say, was this hapless production that it almost had me long for the prior nadir of Uwe Eric Laufenberg’s staging (2016-19), though at least it had none of Laufenberg’s Islamophobia. Illumination such as that offered by Stefan Herheim (2008-12) will always remain a rare experience, but surely a director should be able to do, or at least try to do, better than this.

Sadly, this made it difficult, at least for me, to care much about or even to attend to the musical performances. Pablo Heras-Casado’s conducting was generally fluent enough on the micro-level, but imparted little sense of a greater whole. String tone was sometimes strangely thin, though to his credit, Heras-Casado seemed largely to have the measure of the particular challenges presented by conducting in Bayreuth’s covered pit. The audience, though, was wildly enthusiastic. So too was it for most of the singers (with none of the incomprehensible booing heard the previous night). For me, insofar as I could tell beyond the production, they were more impressive than moving. Andreas Schager was his usual indefatigable self in the title role. We are lucky to have him and his seemingly boundless enthusiasm, although his voice is no longer so fresh as it was. Ekaterina Gubanova similarly gave much as Kundry; her attention to the equally exacting demands of words and music was noteworthy throughout. So too was Georg Zeppenfeld’s as Gurnemanz, though Heras-Casado’s lack of greater structural command did not assist the narrations. Derek Welton’s Amfortas was finely sung throughout, as were the choral contributions. A concert performance would, frankly, have enabled greater appreciation both of these performances and of Wagner’s drama.

Tannhäuser, Royal Opera, 1 February 2023

Royal Opera House

Images: Clive Barda / ROH

 
Hermann, Landgrave of Thuringia – Mika Kares
Tannhäuser – Stefan Vinke
Wolfram von Eschenbach – Gerald Finley
Walther von der Vogelweide – Egor Zhuravskii
Biterolf – Michael Kraus
Heinrich der Schreiber – Michael Gibson
Reinmar von Zweter – Jeremy White
Elisabeth – Lise Davidsen
Venus – Ekaterina Gubanova
Young Shepherd – Sarah Dufresne
Elisabeth’s Attendants – Kathy Bathko, Deborah Peake-Jones, Louise Armit, Amanda Baldwin
Dancers – Matthew Cotton, Camilla Curiel, Donny Ferris, Evelyn Hart, Liudmila Loglisci, Risa Maki, Sean Moss, Andrea Paniagua, George Perez, Thomas Kerek, Hobie Schouppe, Juliette Tellier

Tim Albery (director)
Jasmin Vardimon (choreography, Venusberg scene)
Michael Levine (set designs)
Jon Morrell (costumes)
David Finn (lighting)
Maxine Braham (movement)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus director: William Spaulding)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Sebastian Weigle (conductor)


‘R. slept well and has decided to have a massage only once a day,’ writes Cosima Wagner in one of her last diary entries, from Venice, only twenty days before Richard’s death (when Cosima’s world and thus her diary came to an end). The day took its course, via Cosima’s characteristic desire ‘not to thwart or overburden the cherished workings of his mind,’ a ride to the Piazzetta during which Wagner extols Bach’s fugues, luncheon, visitors, R. yet again reading Gobineau, to: ‘Chat in the evening, brought to an end by R. with the “Shepherd’s Song” and “Pilgrim’s Chorus” from Tannhäuser. He says he still owes the world a Tannhäuser.’

With those celebrated words—and the tantalising prospect of hearing Wagner, even at that stage in his life, playing from his Grosse romantische Oper at the piano, perhaps singing along—the composer pointed not only to ongoing dissatisfaction with the form Tannhäuser, revisions notwithstanding, had yet reached. He also drew attention to the potential he believed his material, musical and dramatic, still had to reach a more satisfactory, perhaps more ‘finished’ state. Should one agree with Wagner—a sizable contingent has long preferred to shun changes made for Paris and Vienna, adhering to something close to what was originally given in Dresden—these twin, related issues will inevitably inform musical performance and staging alike. (Arguably, even if one returns to Dresden, less easy than some claim, one cannot forget what comes after, and that will continue to colour in one way or another the approach one takes. ‘Authenticity’ is always an illusion and usually a pernicious one.) Whether problem, opportunity, or both, it was difficult not to sense such questions hanging over what was seen and heard in the second revival of Tim Albery’s production for Covent Garden, now conducted by Sebastian Weigle.

 

It is certainly difficult to imagine a Tannhäuser in which the dichotomy between Venusberg and Wartburg does not loom large—some might say damagingly so, crushing the prospects for more plausible psychological motivation. (Some, equally might say this is Wagnerian myth, not Ibsen; psychological realism is hardly at issue here, at least not straightforwardly so.) Take the opening Venusberg scene, where the greatest difference between ‘Dresden’ and ‘Paris’—whatever qualifications we can and should add, still the fundamental distinction between versions—will always be seen and heard. It is rare, though not quite unheard of, in my experience not to regret the loss of the additional music written for Paris, should director and/or conductor opt for Dresden. In many ways, the Overture and Bacchanale were promising. Weigle’s way with the former, in particular, seemed to look (listen) back, a more Mendelssohnian Wagner than one often hears, with what at times sounded like—though surely were not—more chamber orchestral forces. What, surely, one then should hear is an invasion from the realm of Tristan; one—or I—never quite did. The stylistic incongruity of later material, such as it is, should be enabled to present immanent critique. Here, I am afraid, it simply seemed to go on for a bit too long: surely missing one of several points. It was, to a certain extent, made up for by the excellence of the dancers, strangely choreographed by Jasmin Vardimon, in a way that more often suggests school PE lessons than something more conventionally erotic. (Maybe that is the point, but it is probably better not to go there.) The dancing itself, though, deserves credit as first-rate; without that, it would have been a long trudge, and without the excuse of being a pilgrimage.

Albery’s production itself has its moment of greatest promise here—probably not coincidentally. The opera house, however many times we have seen this before, is fruitfully reflected onstage. Whether Tannhäuser has made it as artist and stands in need of a fresh, perhaps less sticky, challenge, or whether he was mad to leave is left to us, which is fair enough. But the conflation of Venusberg, Royal Opera House, and, in couplings with dancers, the Paris Jockey Club too has something to be said for it—if only its implications had been pursued. For, apart from when it necessarily returns close to the end, the idea of Tannhäuser as artist seems pretty much to be dropped. The proscenium arch lies as a ruin in the second act, but why we are in what seems to be a guerrilla war zone—Bosnia, we originally thought, perhaps now Ukraine—I have no idea. I cannot imagine the idea is that, without Covent Garden, love it as we may, there will be civil war, but who knows? No one I have spoken to, at any rate. Much of what unfolded seemed barely directed at all, as if the singers had been left to fend for themselves; perhaps they had.

 

Weigle proved more variable. The first act increasingly dragged. I do not know how long it actually lasted on the clock, but it seemed to last longer than any I could recall. Part of that, doubtless, was the production, but there was a near-fatal lack of inner, musical tension, recovered, albeit fitfully, during the second and third acts. What was ultimately lacking, though, was any real sense of the musical architecture. This can, arguably should, be understood in various ways. It need not all be Klemperer (though what I should give to hear that putative performance), nor for that matter Furtwängler (likewise). Likewise, it need not all be Wagner’s various musical inheritances, grand opéra included, just as it need not all be aspiration towards music-drama proper. But some sense of being more than number opera joined up is surely essential, or at the very least strongly desirable. The orchestra, likewise, came and went, strings sometimes sounding scrawny, at others blooming nicely. Offstage brass, however, was magnificent. There were many pleasures to be heard from vernal woodwind too.

Another, more prosaic, type of problem was presented by Stefan Vinke in the title role. Four nights previously, on the first night, he had withdrawn through illness. This time, he sang, but his voice and, with it, the drama came close to being lost altogether in the Venusberg scene. He rallied and, a similar yet less extreme example in the Rome Narration notwithstanding, showed great professionalism in doing so. It was not a great omen, though, and seemed to unsettle audience and cast alike—maybe, to be fair, it did the conductor too. Otherwise, Vinke’s straightforward way with the role had much to be said for it: no great revelations, but capable of despatching it, clear of words and musical line, and physically enthusiastic. Lise Davidsen, though, was the true star of the show, as she was when I saw her previously in this role, at Bayreuth in 2019. She strikes a wonderful balance between Nordic cool (a reprehensible yet perhaps inevitable cliché) and warm humanity, as indeed she has in everything in which I have heard her. There is no doubting her ability to sing Elisabeth; that is a given. But she does much more with it too, whilst leaving the character open to our own thoughts. Arguably, Elisabeth will always remain something of an enigma, and that is no bad thing; or, alternatively, for her to be more than that, Wagner would have to have rewritten the part, and he did not.

 

Anyone daring to succeed Christian Gerhaher as Wolfram as his work cut out, but Gerald Finley succeeded in making the role his own through song; not, I hasten to add, that this was not a well-acted performance too, for it was, but rather that it was musically and, indeed, verbally conceived in the first instance. Ekaterina Gubanova’s Venus held the stage through abundant personality, of stage and vocal varieties. Mika Kares’s Landgrave cut a powerful presence. Sarah Dufresne’s beautifully sung Shepherd had one wish the part might be extended. The Royal Opera Chorus was on very good form, well prepared by William Spaulding.

 



Nevertheless, firmer hands on the ultimate rudders, both scenic and musical, would have lifted the evening considerably. Is Wagner, as sometimes I have heard claimed, to blame, here, for still owing us his later thoughts on (and with) the work? That would be far too easy a get-out clause. Tannhäuser may not be perfect; it may not even be finished, or capable of being finished. But I am not the only one to have seen and heard other, more convincing near-solutions to its riddles. From Barenboim to Thielemann, from Götz Friedrich to Tobias Kratzer, it can be done. Oddly, though, my impression is that a number of the shortcomings on offer here, as well as the virtues, may actually have set many in the audience thinking about the nature of the work and its problematical dramaturgy. Perhaps it is time to intone, affecting an Anglican rather than Catholic or Lutheran voice, that we all, ‘in a very real sense’, still owe the world a Tannhäuser.

Tristan und Isolde, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 18 March 2018

Staatsoper Unter den Linden

Images: Monika Rittershaus

Tristan – Andreas Schager

King Marke – Stephen Milling

Isolde – Anja Kampe

Kurwenal – Boaz Daniel

Melot – Stephan Rügamer

Brangäne – Ekaterina Gubanova

Steersman – Adam Kutny

Young Sailor, Shepherd – Linard Vrielink

Tristan’s Mother – Kristin Becker

Tristan’s Father – Mike Hoffmann

English horn (onstage) – Florian Hanspach-Torkildsen

Dmitri Tcherniakov (director, set designs)

Elena Zaytseva (costumes)

Gleb Filshtinsky (lighting)

Tieni Burkhalter (video)

Tatina Vereshchagina, Detlef Giese (dramaturgy)

Berlin State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Raymond Hughes)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

Tristan (Andreas Schager) and ensemble

No one doubts the supreme challenge presented in performing Tristan und Isolde. After seventy-seven rehearsals, the intended 1861 Vienna premiere had to be abandoned. A work that had taken less than three years to write took more than double that, as John Deathridge has observed, to ‘overcome prejudice about its viability. … Strasbourg, Karlsruhe, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Dresden, Hanover, Stuttgart, Prague, and Vienna: in the end none of these opera houses would touch it.’ When Munich finally did, in 1865, Wagner’s Tristan, Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, died after just four performances. Wagner’s foes, political, aesthetic, and ‘moral’, seized on the opportunity to claim, ludicrously, that Tristan, rather than typhus was the agent of death. If audiences today avoid quite such high (melo)drama, more often than not they meet the curse on the other side of Wagner’s melodramatic coin: ‘only mediocre performances can save me! Perfectly good ones will be bound to drive people mad, - I cannot imagine it otherwise. This is how far I have gone!! Oh dear! – I was just in full career! Adieu!’

The twin dangers of unviability and necessary mediocrity were avoided in this outstanding performance from the Staatskapelle Berlin, Daniel Barenboim, and a cast headed by Andreas Schager and Anja Kampe. When I last heard Barenboim conduct Tristan, in 2010, I observed that this, ‘of the three Tristans in the theatre’ I had heard him conduct, had ‘surely [been] the best, above all in as searing a first act as I have ever heard, reminiscent of Karl Böhm at Bayreuth.’ This proved a more powerful musical experience still, and quite different. Yes, the first act was ‘searing’, but it had little in common with Böhm, save perhaps for the visceral, overwhelming quality to the close, which left me in quite a state of shock: not so far from Wagner’s ‘perfectly good ones … bound to drive people mad’. Barenboim now appears to be hearing Tristan more overtly through ears transformed by his recent Parsifal performances – or at least leading us to do so. (Perhaps it is not entirely a coincidence that they too have been collaborations with Dmitri Tcherniakov – and Schager, and, oneyear, Kampe too.)

Some people have, apparently, been complaining that his tempi were ‘slow’: do they really want a ‘fast’ Tristan? I fear that, unconsciously or even consciously fearful of Wagner’s ‘perfectly good,’ they actually might. Perhaps sometimes they were. I have no idea, not being a clock-watcher. More importantly, there were ample space and tension, for the ebb and flow of Wagner’s Schopenhauerian Will to find orchestral representation. For, still more than Parsifal, the music of Beethoven – and Barenboim’s recent Beethoven, as heard in a life-changing symphonic Proms cycle with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra – made its harmonic mark. The ‘growth’ of harmony from the bass line, even when, indeed particularly when, Wagner’s extreme chromaticism tugs away from it, ensured both musicodramatic comprehensibility and a placing between Beethoven and Schoenberg, yet reducible to neither. The Staatskapelle Berlin might almost be taken for granted in this, so inveterate is its Wagnerian excellence; it should not be. Without its dark, ‘German’ tone, ‘traditional’ and yet probing so many of those new musical worlds seemingly born in this score, we should come nowhere near The World as Will and Representation at all, still less to a ‘perfectly good’ Tristan.

Isolde (Anja Kampe), Brangäne (Ekaterina Gubanova)

Likewise Barenboim’s excellent cast, crucial to far more than the ‘surface’ role Schopenhauer’s aesthetics might suggest. Schager again might readily be taken for granted. (Remember when we had no such Heldentenor? It was not so long ago.) His was certainly the finest account of the role I have heard in the theatre, fully worthy of comparison with the great, doubtless mythologised performances of the recorded past, although again certainly not to be reduced to them, nor indeed to comparisons therewith. If the seemingly infinite vocal resources Schager can call upon to make his way through the third act monologue – it was to that in particular that Wagner referred in his letter – suggest Lauritz Melchior, there was none of the laziness or, at least, somewhat cavalier attitude that could afflict the latter’s work. Schager can sing the part and he does, but dramatically it needs to be hard work; we need to feel, to share in, Tristan’s struggle, even as it frightens, repels us. We did, in this, a performance for the ages. Kampe’s Isolde was perhaps not on quite so grand a scale; nor did it need to be. She offered her own detailed portrayal, again matching ‘musical’ and ‘dramatic’ imperatives – as if they might ever formally be separated! – to a degree it would be difficult to match, let alone to surpass. Boaz Daniel and Ekaterina Gubanova offered far more than support as Kurwenal and Brangäne, the latter’s ‘operatic Lied’ approach, unfailingly sensitive to words and their implications, without permitting them to override the imperatives of the musical line. King Markes rarely disappoint: what a gift of a role it is in a more traditional sense. Nevertheless, Stephen Milling’s depth of tone and grace of character impressed greatly. Amongst a strong ‘supporting’ cast, Linard Vrielink’s beautifully sung Young Sailor and Shepherd stood out.

There remains, however, another common danger, increasingly common, to contemporary Tristan performances – more strictly, to productions. That is of missing the point of the work entirely. I hope it will not be taken that I am referring in some generic reactionary fashion to the ‘creator’s intentions’. However, Tristan seems in practice to prove unusually resistant to attempts even to question what it might be ‘about’. The idea of the work being shoehorned, for instance, into a justified protest against anti-immigration policies hardly bears thinking about. Tristan is certainly not in any emphatic sense ‘about’ its ‘characters’, insofar as they be characters at all; it seems to come closer than any other of Wagner’s dramas to that all-too-celebrated description of ‘deeds of music made visible’. Prior to Tcherniakov’s staging, I had yet to see what might broadly be termed an ‘interventionist’ staging that worked.

King Marke (Stephen Milling), Tristan, Melot (Stephan Rügamer), Kurwenal (Boaz Daniel)

Does Tcherniakov change that? I hope it is not unduly pretentious – it may already prove a little late to sound that alert – to say I think it too soon to tell. What I can say is that his production has made me think about the issues involved like no other: an achievement I think worth lauding in itself. By contrast with his perhaps atypical, unquestionably brilliant Parsifal – the best I have seen since Stefan Herheim – we return to Tcherniakov’s homeground of the unpleasant rich. Fair enough: with kings, queens, and princes, that is what we are dealing with. Elena Zaytseva’s costumes and Tcherniakov’s own set designs – in the first act, a true luxury vessel, replete with ‘bespoke’ anything you might care to mention; in the second, a ‘tasteful’ Jugendstil indoor forest ‘theme’ we want to hate, yet secretly want – instantly evoke the excesses of a corporate, materialistic world we know only too well. The third act by contrast retreats to a homely comfort zone for Tristan, an old moneyed boy who never grew up (haunted, as his monologue tells us, by the circumstances of his birth, visions of his parents appearing in his delirium).

Is that all too specific, though? Does it fall into the trap of making Tristan about the trappings of wealth? Not really, for there is an intriguing, deadly game afoot. Tcherniakov does not treat the lovers as identical, as two mere parts of ‘Tristan and Isolde’. He does not accept Wagner, let alone Schopenhauer, at face value. Instead, he implicitly, even explicitly, criticises some of their (neo-)Romantic premises. Is Tristan, perhaps even Isolde at times, actually mocking whatever it is they play out? It is not always clear, but there is a degree of unnerving alienation to the proceedings that intrigues, questions, even (metatheatrically?) frightens. A woman fainting in the second act seems to fall into their trap, or is she in on the game too? Or, perhaps most important, is this a critique of the game we play, when we sit around, almost as Nietzsche’s ‘Wagnerians’, ‘disciples – benumbed, pale, breathless!’, both at the performance, enraptured, and afterwards, discussing how singular this work is, how it refuses directorial interventionism? The question of aestheticisation is live, just as in the Staatsoper’s newproduction by Hans Neuenfels of Salome, which I saw the previous evening: a fascinating, provocative pairing. Who, both productions seem to ask, is the Wagnerian now, whether on or off stage? The English horn player on stage (the excellent Florian Hanspach-Torkildsen) perhaps asks us something similar, his deeds of music rendered unusually visible.

Shepherd (Linard Vrielink), Florian Hanspach-Torkildsen (English horn)

Tcherniakov seems to me on balance to succeed where many others have failed, presenting an element of alienation that holds work and musical performance at arm’s length, without descending into mere reductionist banality. In the separation of ‘work’ and staging, even of musical performance and staging, the two become problematically, rather than mystically, reengaged. Romanticism is decisively rejected, whether in work or reception. It need not always be, perhaps, but it is here – and fruitfully. For instance, Karol Berger has recently argued that that is, part way through Tristan’s monologue, it ‘is clear thus far … that the escape from the separating illusions of Day into the unifying truth of Night remains Tristan’s goal, but a goal he cannot accomplish in Isolde’s absence, since they need to escape together.’ Perhaps. I should certainly allow, at least, that that was Wagner’s intention, most likely even what he thought he had achieved. The work here, though, I think, knows better than its creator. Wagner’s need to ‘transcend’ at the close already betrays the relative poverty of such Romanticism, just as Mozart’s terrifyingly clear-eyed coda to Così fan tutte does (more knowingly, I think, although that may be debated).

Tristan and Isolde

Tcherniakov’s treatment of the so-called Liebestod – Wagner’s own ‘Verklärung’ is worth fighting for against Liszt’s well-meaning misunderstanding – seems to me of particular interest here, sharing, even intensifying the ambiguity of work, conception, and tradition. Tristan’s room returns to darkness, Isolde having cocooned herself with him, safe from prying eyes – whether ours or those on stage. The prior onstage separation between Shepherd and his instrument, the scenic and the musical, seems thereby at a remove almost to have been overcome. We could believe in what she is doing, she doubtless could too; but we do not, and we doubt whether she does. Wagner’s reconciliation is false. Which returned this listener at least to one of the most searching – as well as, on occasion, utterly wrong-headed – of Wagner’s critics after Nietzsche: Theodor Adorno. On the final page of his Essay on Wagner, we read: ‘Tristan’s curse upon love [Minne] is more than the impotent sacrifice intoxication offers up to asceticism.’ It is rather music’s rebellion against its own ‘constraint of Fate’. In that rebellion, music will often benefit from enlisting the services of ‘drama’, and vice versa. Negative dialectics indeed.

Prom 15: Staatskapelle Berlin/Barenboim - Die Walküre, 23 July 2013

Royal Albert Hall

Siegmund – Simon O’Neill

Sieglinde – Anja Kampe
Hunding – Eric Halfvarson
Wotan – Bryn Terfel
Brünnhilde – Nina Stemme
Fricka – Ekaterina Gubanova
Gerhilde – Sonja Mühleck
Ortlinde – Carola Höhn
Waltraute – Ivonne Fuchs
Schwertleite – Anaïk Morel
Helmwige – Susan Foster
Siegrune – Leann Sandel-Pantaleo
Grimgerde – Anna Lapkovskaja
Rossweisse – Simone Schröder

Justin Way (director)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

Images: Copyright: BBC/Chris Christodoulou

The superstitious would have us believe that it is better not to build up expectations, lest they be confounded. Perhaps that makes sense in some endeavours, but in a performance of the Ring, the experience is cumulative. True, one might be disappointed after an excellent Rheingold; however, in this case, it offered the perfect preparation for an excellent first ‘day’ proper. As in Berlin, an often ‘objectivist’ Rheingold was followed by a warmly Romantic Walküre, the dramatic contrast between godly prehistory and the realm of Wagner’s ‘purely human’ palpable from the outset. If anything, Barenboim’s Wagnerian mastery – and that is certainly not too strong a term – was more impregnable than in 2011. He was doubtless assisted by a kinder acoustic – how often does anyone say that of this venue – in the Royal Albert Hall than in the Schiller Theater, where he had also elected to have the pit semi-covered. Here, however, the Staatskapelle Berlin was rightly enthroned as the brightest star in the evening’s constellation, the benefits of a semi-staged performance once again manifest. In both cases, the only serious ‘competition’ – a horrible concept, but let that pass for the moment – from my experience had been provided by Bernard Haitink with Royal Opera forces, again at the Royal Albert Hall. Barenboim and Haitink are certainly the only conductors I have heard, at least in the flesh, to have shaped the architecture of the second act satisfactorily. Once again, it is clear that Barenboim has learned his Furtwänglerian lessons, without in any sense slavishly following that greatest of all Wagner conductors.

 

The Act I Prelude set the tone in more than one sense for what was to follow, Wagner’s music audibly founded upon the bass line, very much as Furtwängler would have understood it to be; moreover, it was music, not some mere storm ‘effect’, very much as Furtwängler – and Beethoven – would have understood. Almost infinitely variegated in terms of dynamic contrast, it subsided to the tenderest of ppp, again setting out Barenboim’s stall for a performance that would prove little short of all-encompassing. Soon a classically dark ‘old German’ string sound – think of Furtwängler’s Berlin Philharmonic prior to Karajan’s internationalising tendencies – would take centre stage, both in sectional and solo (that cello) offerings. When Sieglinde brought her guest the drinking horn, the cello proved, may Wagner forgive me, as eloquent as in any Brahms chamber work. The cellos’ recitative at the end of the scene, as Sieglinde invites Siegmund to stay at the house where Unheil lives, audibly echoed Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, straining in Wagner’s Opera and Drama terms, for the Word, and in Walküre terms, for the words to express already-burgeoning love. That takes both an orchestra and conductor steeped in central musical (that is, German) Kultur; would that either of our London houses could offer that at the moment. Similarly, the presentiment of Tristan (Act II) afforded from the strings as Wotan, in his farewell to Brünnhilde, told of the ‘üppigen Rausch’ (voluptuous intoxication) she had imbibed from love’s cup spoke of equally subtle contributions from composer, conductor, and players alike. Just as Wagner’s immersion in his harmonic world permitted him to steal from the future, so did Barenboim’s and the orchestra’s parallel immersion permit us to note that detail.

 

This great orchestra is far more than its string section, of course. Every section, indeed very instrument, shone – as would be acknowledged by Barenboim at the end, with the number of individual bows he allowed his musicians. Woodwind malevolence resounded to perfection, as if Tristan’s potion were being brewed before our ears, as Hunding noted the same ‘glissende Wurm’ in the siblings’ eyes. How the horns terrified, as demented – Wagner’s own direction – as Sieglinde herself during her second act hallucinations; the ancient Wild Hunt itself seemed to have dawned. The brass would soon, of course, turn gravely beautiful, their part in the Annunciation of Death evocation of the most venerable of funeral equale. Moreover, the brass-led awakenings in the first act’s final scene, as if building upon new sunlit dawns from Lohengrin, were never crude in the way one must often fear from English orchestras; they were powerful, but never brash.

 

Such was the case even when Barenboim whipped up the fiercest agitation, for example when Sieglinde, ‘beside herself’, named her brother Siegmund. The ongoing accelerando during her rapture once again had one thinking of Furtwängler, so dramatically right and perfectly achieved was Barenboim’s accomplishment. In a very different mood, the darkness of the curse that resounded following Fricka’s departure in the following act was all the more troubling given its grounding in both timbre and harmony. Only a conductor who knows the score inside out, and knows where musically it has come from and in what direction it is tending will accomplish that. Wagner famously described the art of transition as his subtlest art, and so once again it proved here, as that between Act II Scenes 2 and 3 took us, line unbroken, from the slough of despond to the danger and exhilaration of our love-communist outcasts. The command of architecture in this act to which I previously referred was perhaps the greatest of Barenboim’s many achievements.  Moreover, the sweetness of the Magic Fire Music allowed a final, properly phantasmagorical coming together of the orchestra as a whole: not rushed, as so often it is, but with an attentiveness on Barenboim’s part that revealed quite how disturbing this anything-but-innocent putting Brünnhilde to sleep truly is.

 

The only real fly in the ointment was Simon O’Neill’s Siegmund. Tireless and hard-working though the assumption may be, there is nothing in the way of tonal beauty, and the German continues to sound ‘learned’ rather than ‘lived’. Heroism is not evoked by simple loudness, let alone by shouting, as often endured. Even at his less abrasive, O’Neill sounded more like an ageing alderman than an alluring outlaw; one could not help but think that nine out of ten Sieglindes would have elected to stay with Hunding. The contrast at the beginning of the first act’s final scene between O’Neill’s voice and the ravishing beauty of solo horn and cello was especially painful. Likewise his ‘Wälsungen-Blut,’ the final word of the first act. Anja Kampe, from her first entry, offered a merciful contrast, in terms of vocal quality, imparting of meaning to the words, and general lack of crudity. She offered sexual and musical urgency in the moonlight, whereas O’Neill offered the charisma of a middle manager. The soft pregnancy of tone and expression when she told of what she had heard as a child had me keenly aware of my own heartbeat; in tandem with Barenboim, this Sieglinde, despite an occasionally unruly top register, offered societal rupture and sensual rapture. There were times when Halfvarson’s balance as Hunding tipped too far from the musical to the verbal, at least for my Wagnerian appreciation. (The director Keith Warner, however, has recently been contesting such claims, arguing that ‘acting’, considered broadly, should always come first.) By the same token, however, a beautifully dark, Martti Talvela-like voice was lavished on words such as ‘Die so leidig Loos dir beschied nicht liebte die Norn.’ Given the tonal quality of what we had just heard from Siegmund, it was indeed difficult not to agree that the Norn had felt little love for him. Occasionally, a little more balance to Halfvarson’s voice would have been welcome, but there were certainly pitch-black compensations to be had.

 

Nina Stemme offered a Brünnhilde keen in every sense, from her opening ‘Hojotoho’ onwards, never failing in tone, even if she forgot a few words in Act III. (In a display of equal acuity and generosity, Terfel acted as her prompter and normal service was resumed.) Her voice has no weaker register, or at least it did not on this occasion, thereby allowing equal expressiveness throughout. Stemme’s apparent tirelessness bodes well for Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. Ekaterina Gubanova once again proved an excellent Fricka. ‘So ist es denn aus mit den ewigen Göttern...’ was delivered with rare fury; this was a woman scorned, no ice-maiden. Likewise her ‘verlacht’, as in ‘derided’ of men, offered true bitterness, as the gods’ Feuerbach-inspired dethronement gathered pace. Moreover, the Valkyries were an excellent bunch. They and their conductor ensured that their ‘Ride’ was an infinitely more musical experience than one generally suffers; again, I had to think back to Haitink to recall something comparable. Even the laughter was musically delivered. Susan Foster’s Helmwige ‘Hojotoho!’ truly made me sit up and listen, but there were no weak links here.

 

Bryn Terfel’s Wotan had me initially fear the worst, his opening contributions somewhat coarse – and subsequent passages were not all entirely innocent of that charge. However, his musico-dramatic identification with the role won me over to acknowledge what may well be the finest performance I have heard from him. Singing ‘Nimm den Eid!’ as Fricka had her say, the ‘Eid’ (oath) that he offered was arguably over-emphasised, though opinions will differ. Other details, however, were spot on, for instance his despairingly whispered – following Wagner’s directions – ‘Als junger Liebe Lust mir verblich’ to Brünnhilde, aided by the most sepulchral of brass. Likewise in that same monologue, the shading, visibly guided by Barenboim, on the word ‘Rhein,’ when he told of his failure to return the ring to its source: the word offered both a sign of a better world than that which now prevailed, and the hopelessness of ever (re-)turning to it. ‘Das Ende – das Ende!’ presented first vehement anger, then ghostly despair, shadowed by the unerring orchestra. I have rarely been impressed by Terfel’s Wagner but this highly distinguished performance was worth the price of admission alone.  The desolation felt at the end of the second act was a tribute to him almost as much as to Barenboim, though of course it was the orchestra that sent the final shivers of terror down the spine.

 

The audience still provides too many unwelcome interventions of its own. There was far too much coughing, especially during the third act and, most unforgivably, the Annunciation of Death. And, intentional or otherwise, the opening of a fizzy drink – no one, repeat no one, should be eating or drinking during the performance in any case – was an unnecessary illustration of Siegmund sipping from his draught. Such, however, is part of the price we pay to hear the Ring at the Proms; no one in his right mind would think the bargain unholy and Wotan-like.